Queen’s Speech

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, my remarks all relate to higher education and research. I declare an interest as a member of Cambridge University. The backdrop, of course, is that higher education enrolment has risen over recent decades to around 40% of each age cohort. This expansion is surely welcome, but it has not led to greater variety among universities. They nearly all still focus on three or four-year degrees and nearly all offer some postgraduate degrees. They all try to rise in the same distorting and misleading league table.

The system needs a more diverse ecology, a blurring of higher and further education, and an expansion of distance learning and lifelong learning. There is scope for new teaching institutions, including high-quality liberal arts colleges, but it is not clear that degree-giving powers should be so widely dispersed. Surely it is fairer to students that their qualifications should be accredited by a respected institution—in the spirit of the old London external degrees—rather than by,

“a provider that may exit the market”,

to quote the inelegant phrase in the White Paper.

Despite energetic access initiatives by universities such as mine, 18 year-olds unlucky in their school-age experiences are challenged to reach the bar for entry to a demanding degree course. Sadly, the present system gives them no second chance. The most selective universities could enhance social mobility by reserving a fraction of their places for mature students who have not come directly from school but who have caught up later by obtaining credits or doing foundation courses elsewhere, perhaps via the Open University. Transferable credits, even if they are not sufficient for graduation, should be accepted as worthwhile qualifications in themselves. Those who do not complete degrees should not be typecast as failures or wastage. An American will say, “I had two years of college”, and will regard the experience as positive.

Another feature of the American system is that PhD-level education and research are concentrated in only about 5% of the institutions that give bachelor’s degrees. At the top of the research league, Harvard, MIT and Berkeley are major national assets through the worldwide pull they exert on mobile talent, the collective expertise of their faculty and the consequent quality of the graduates they feed into all walks of life. Each is embedded in a cluster of research labs, small companies, NGOs and so forth, to symbiotic benefit.

We should cherish the UK’s counterparts to these great research universities. But it is also crucial to foster and fund the translation of research findings into social or commercial benefits; that is the rationale for Innovate UK, the Catapults, and so on. But there are misperceptions about what is actually needed. Even though the UK punches above its weight in producing research, more than 90% of the world’s research is still done elsewhere, so most UK innovations and start-ups are unlikely to be based directly on discoveries made here. That is why the research universities are doubly valuable—because their faculty and graduates are plugged in to global networks. They can seize on good ideas from anywhere in the world and run with them.

The system depends on the dual support system for research, which is something that our universities value, and which Americans envy. For it to operate, some kind of research excellence framework, or REF, is a necessary evil. But at the moment it looms far too large; it offers perverse constraints and incentives. In so far as teaching is under-prioritised, the over-focus on the REF must take some of the blame. It is welcome news that the noble Lord, Lord Stern, is undertaking a review; it is also welcome that the introduction of the new teaching assessment in universities will be gradual and can be adjusted in the light of experience.

In contrast, the White Paper proposes a major one-off reorganisation of research funding. There are widely-voiced anxieties that the changes are needlessly drastic. It is proposed that all seven research councils will lose their royal charter—even the Medical Research Council, which has a global reputation and a century-old history. The executive chairs of the councils will be subordinate to the CEO of a single merged organisation called UKRI. Moreover, UKRI will also, more controversially, include Innovate UK, a body with an important but distinct role in promoting innovation. UKRI will report to civil servants in BIS, where there will no longer be a senior independent scientist analogous to the former director-general for the research councils.

After any reorganisation, there are transitional hassles before the new structure beds down. This was manifest when research councils were established or closed down and when a separate ministry, DIUS, was set up, and then closed down within two or three years. When the research councils set up the so-called shared research service in 2008, the overheads went up, not down.

The Government’s proposals are based on a review by Sir Paul Nurse, who accepted that the current research support system worked fairly well but aspired to improve it. It is seductive to believe that reshuffling the administrative structure will achieve this, but it may not prove either necessary or sufficient and may indeed be counterproductive. Moreover, it is already proving hard to attract people with the stature expected as heads of research councils. That may be harder still if the posts are downgraded.

It is plainly important that the existing research councils mesh together and collaborate when necessary. Ministers need advice on how to apportion funding between different councils, on the balance between responsive mode grants and strategic initiatives, and so on. But these aims can surely be achieved with good will and capable management within the present structure by strengthening high-level input from the CST and reviving a body resembling the old advisory board for the research councils to play the role envisaged for UKRI’s board. When there are so many distracting pressures in the educational and research world, surely we should avoid risky upheaval in a system that is working reasonably well and which really needs no more than some fine-tuning.